


The Wake-up Call

by Lilysmum



Category: The Killing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-26 23:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5024554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilysmum/pseuds/Lilysmum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Linden and Holder share an early-morning dream...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wake-up Call

**Author's Note:**

> This is set sometime mid-Season 1

Holder, 7:30am.

 

 

Holder’s never had a hot dream about his boss before. Which is not really too unusual - he’s never had a female boss until now.

 

But Linden? Seriously?

 

He hadn’t even known he was attracted to her. Much.

 

Sure, she’s good looking. And wicked smart. But she’s not very nice.

 

She spends most of her time with him obviously wishing she was somewhere else, and whatever time is left over after that she spends staring into space trying to get into the mind of their victim. The fact that she is supposed to be spending time training _his ass_ doesn’t seem to matter to her at all. She’s sarcastic, dismissive; she clearly thinks he knows nothing and she has this way of looking at him that tells him she sees him as just too much work.

 

But he gets it, he does.  If she does in fact really want to be done with the job and fly off into the sunset to marry the BF, of course she’d have no time for a rookie detective, even one that does happen to be a damned fine specimen of The Human Male. But what he really thinks, and maybe he’s wrong but he doesn’t think so, is that deep down she doesn’t want to leave. If you ask him, the pull of that dead body and those parents’ faces is just too strong a force for her to resist.  It didn’t take him long to figure something out about her - it’s the _job_ that really turns her crank, and try as she might, she can’t let go.

 

 Maybe the sunny life in wine country with Mr. Wonderful is just a distraction. Just another problem on her list, a list that he figures includes him as well.

 

Linden doesn’t know it yet but Holder’s smart and he’s got good instincts. Woman acts like she’s got some kind of a sixth sense, and if he’s honest he tends to believe it. He wouldn’t say it to her face but he does kind of dig the way she goes off into her own little world, like a deer in the forest sniffing the wind.

 

He can’t blame her for not paying attention to him, really. But he likes to think that if she sticks around long enough she might just find out there’s more to him than she thought. Not that she’s ever given him any thought, that’s pretty clear. But still. As much as he’d thought he wanted to work this case alone, there have been more than a couple of times where he’s hoped that she will. Stick around, that is.

 

So yeah, she has gotten under his skin. That ain’t hard to do with a guy in his situation. But he wouldn’t have thought that would be enough to inspire a dream like this one.

 

It’s a good, good dream. It’s not a sex dream, technically, because they aren’t actually doing the deed. But his Dream Self knows they’re _going to_ , just as soon as they can find a suitable place to park the car. His car. And he’s driving, or trying to, which isn’t easy, because Linden has her hand on his leg. It’s just resting there, mid-thigh, giving a very capable-seeming squeeze whenever she feels like it. He knows he’s speeding, taking corners too fast, but it’s okay. It’s a means to an end, an end he really freaking hopes is not too far away.

 

In the next second they’re parked in some kind of forested area, and it’s dark now, all of a sudden. There’s a moon and the heavy rich autumn smell of leaves and rain. He’s so jacked his hands are shaking, and his whole body is hard, he feels like some kind of action figure when he turns in his seat to look at Linden. For her part, Linden looks calm, serene. Her eyes are wide open, looking at him. She has a quiet little smile on her face, and then like a dream-within-a-dream she reaches out and puts her hand on his chest, and leans in and kisses him once, then twice, patiently and slowly, on the mouth, like she’s trying to teach him something.

 

“Like this,” she’s saying, “just like this.”

 

It’s on the tip of his tongue to tell her that he has actually done this before, but he can’t, the tip of his tongue is busy elsewhere and anyway, what would be the point of interrupting her, she’ll figure it out. He wouldn’t mind if this part took longer but his brain hits fast forward again to where Linden has upped the ante. She’s got her hands up inside his hoodie and she’s rubbing herself up against him, he’s got his hands all over her too and his brain is screaming at him not to wake up but he does, with the sheets tangled around his legs and his face pressed into the pillow and teenage-calibre wood that’s got some very adult ideas.

 

 “Fuck…” he hears himself half-say, half-sigh, and his brain immediately starts with the what? How? _Linden?_ But he does a good job of switching that off and tries to dive back in, into the feel, into the vividness, he can still taste the kiss. He can’t get back into the dream but he’s gotten close, close enough to be able to think what would happen next, when the alarm on his phone goes off, stupid fucking electronic chimes that ruin everything.  He really curses now, rolling over to grab the thing and silence it, squinting to read the time and remembering as he does so that he is supposed to be meeting Linden downtown in precisely 30 minutes.

 

It really is a premium quality boner, and although he doesn’t allow himself to think about Linden when he dispatches it in the shower, (not because he doesn’t want to feel like a creep, but because he doesn’t want to give her that much power), he does let his eyes take a walk all over her a half hour later.  And fuck if she isn’t giving it off this morning. She’s crossing the street to meet him, sure footed, coffee in hand, completely oblivious to his presence.  She’s looking down at her phone. Probably planning to call him, assuming that he’ll be late.

 

She is the hottest thing that he has ever seen.

 

And she has not brought him a coffee, even though he brought her one yesterday, because of course that didn’t occur to her, he would be the last thing on her mind this morning.

 

He lets himself grin at her when she steps up onto the sidewalk beside him, and he blows a little smoke her way as a thank you, as a tease, as a good morning wish.  Linden glances up then, and sees him, and gives him a look. It’s that better-than-the-Mona Lisa dream-smile, calm and serene, and Holder feels it, right down into his core.

 

His guts turn a summersault and he knows now that he’s done for, he is so gone, he’s got it bad.

 

 Damn. 

 

Linden, 7:30am.

 

The alarm on her phone startles her out of a deep sleep. Trying to grab it she knocks it off the bedside table and ends up hanging over the edge of the bed, feeling around on the floor until she finds it and nearly smashes it for having the gall to make so much noise. It’s so strange to be woken up by something, Sarah realizes, puzzled, because she always wakes up before her alarm, her internal clock is always a few clicks ahead.

 

But not today. Today there is something pulling her back down into the bed, beckoning her to come back to sleep… an inviting feeling of soft warmth that is not letting go of her… a dream?  She’d been dreaming, she realizes as she sinks back into the pillows, pulls the covers back over herself, she’d been dreaming of making out with some guy.

 

Not Rick. Someone else. The memory of it is floating back to her in fragments. In a car, they’d been in a car.  Not her car, a big car, an older one that she did not recognize. What the hell? Linden doesn’t dream. She hasn’t had a dream in a long, long time.  And she never has this type of dream, and even if she was going to wouldn’t it be about Rick?

 

So who is this guy?  

 

She closes her eyes and burrows further into the pillow, tries to get the feeling back and it’s easy to do. A younger guy. He’s tall. She can feel her fingers parting layers of soft, nicotine-scented fabric to slide up against warm smooth skin over lean muscles, a strong slender body that is slowly but steadily nudging itself up against her own. And they’re kissing, she thinks she even started it, a kiss so full and so deep she would feel as if she were falling through space if it wasn’t for the large strong hands that are holding her. He tries to talk, in between, and she recognizes his voice but she can’t place it, she can’t really think, all her energy is going into pushing herself up against him but try as she might, she can’t get close enough.

 

She thinks about asking him who he is exactly, but then in the next second she’s breathless as she feels the brush of his facial hair, it’s sparse and semi-soft, like it hasn’t filled in yet or something. He rubs his cheek lightly over her skin and then he’s got his mouth right up against her ear and he’s saying something. She has to strain to make out the words, it’s a familiar voice, someone she knows…

 

“You got somethin’ for me Linden?” he asks her now and he’s half-laughing, half-pleading, all at once, his voice is dark and rough with desire and she knows who he is now…

 

Holder. Jesus, its Holder.

 

The realization makes her throw off her covers and sit straight up in bed. Why the hell would she be dreaming about Holder?  She genuinely doesn’t want to think about him but she has to, as in everything, she needs to understand.

 

Certainly there is something about him that sets him apart; that much she can’t deny as she flops back down on her back and covers her face with her forearms. It isn’t youth exactly, he’s no kid, and it certainly isn’t innocence. But there is an openness to him, she can see who he is, even though he puts up the swagger.  That isn’t really him, she can tell, it’s just his armour, and that annoying hip-hop-street-talk thing he does isn’t his real voice, either. He has gotten easier to take since he’s stopped trying to endear himself to her, that is true, but still. He is too real, somehow, for her comfort, too honest, too intense. Not her type at all. She could never be with a guy like him, ever.  He’d have too much to say, he’d know much, he wouldn’t expect enough. She’d have to reveal too much to him, way too much, so…no. Just no.

 

She tells herself that she is way too far into her thirties to be doing this.  He doesn’t even bear thinking about.

 

Yet thinking about him she is. She showers and dresses on auto-pilot and she’s on the road without even realizing it. Her brain is full of this guy and it doesn’t take long for her to figure out why.

 

She can tell things about him, without being told.

 

That he didn’t have much growing up, one of those kids who often didn’t get enough to eat, who always slept in a shitty second-hand bed, who probably never even got on a plane until sometime in his mid-twenties. A life of hunger and disappointment, for a kid who was smart enough to do well in school but didn’t, his natural talents and abilities going un-noticed and un-nurtured until the day when he knew, when he was sure, that there was something he could do and goddammit he did it. He was someone she recognized all too easily.

 

He was someone like her.

 

She doesn’t feel sorry for him, the same way she doesn’t feel sorry for herself. There’s integrity in being self-made.  Better to rely on yourself, nobody else is truly permanent. For some reason she is comforted by the fact that Holder likely already knows this.

Okay. It’s disconcerting, but at least she understands. She can deal with it now.

 

He’s early, for a change.

 

She can see him waiting for her on the corner across the street while she’s in the coffee shop.  He’s leaning against the bus-stop, one Nike-shod size 12 propped up against the wooden post. He looks all loose and relaxed, smoking a cigarette like it’s the best thing in the world, likely amused by the knowledge that today he can harass her for being late.

 

She thinks about picking up a coffee for him, just the way he likes it, a cup of something so corrupted by cream and sugar that it really shouldn’t be called coffee anymore, but in the end she doesn’t. She got him one the other day at the hospital, and she doesn’t want him getting any ideas. That’s the last thing she needs. Because she’d sleep with him in a second, she knows she would. And she’s sure there’d be no hesitation on his part either, despite that weird note of pride that was in his voice when he told her about his celibacy.

 

She’s careful not to look up at him while she crosses the street. She takes out her phone and clicks on Rick’s number. She knows she should have called him already to say good morning.  She really has to pay more attention to him. With a deep breath she tries to will herself to focus on what matters, because Stephen Holder is now blatantly checking her out, she can see in the periphery.

 

As she steps up on the sidewalk she can’t resist looking up, and gracing him with the ghost of a smile, a remnant of the dream. Something answers her in his eyes, some spark of understanding, and Sarah wonders if he knows that he just became the number one reason that she really needs to get off of this case, out of this town, and into her Real Life.


End file.
